Nutella waffle with strawberries and fresh hazelnuts. Oh, yeah.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife Anne and I attended our second Chicago entertainment convention of 2019, a scant three weeks after the last one. Before and after each day’s festivities we found a few opportunities to see more of the Windy City that we hadn’t checked out on our last several trips. One restaurant in particular proved exactly the breakfast wonderland we needed.
Sunday morning breakfast at Do-Rite Donuts and Chicken. Clockwise from top left: cream cheese Danish, blueberry, cinnamon crumble, red velvet coconut, old-fashioned chocolate, and maple bacon glaze.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Anne and I attended the tenth annual C2E2 entertainment convention a few miles from downtown Chicago. When time permitted before and after the show, once again we wandered the Windy City and took photos, preferably of places and things we didn’t already see on our last several Chicago comic cons. Y’all know me — any excuse for a travel photo gallery.
Badges! And papers! On every table-shaped surface! So. Many. PAPERS.
My brain is buzzing too much to write paragraphs right now. Our ninth foray to C2E2 in Chicago is this weekend, and I think we’re ready, but I dunno if we’re ready ready.
DAY SIX: The other side of the National Memorial Arch at Valley Forge. The complete George Washington quote at the top reads, “Naked and starving as they are / We cannot enough admire / The incomparable Patience and Fidelity / of the Soldiery”.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we guided you through our seven-day trip through Ohio, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania in fifty episodes —- July 7-13, 2018. It all comes down to this, per our tradition for every MCC road trip maxiseries: one final collection of alternate scenes, extra details, and surplus attractions along the way that were squeezed out of the main narrative. Enjoy!
Purple electric chair from the Heinz History Museum. We failed to note its significance, but that color scheme cries out for more accessories.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we guided you through our seven-day trip through Ohio, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania in fifty episodes —- July 7-13, 2018, with stops along the way at nine museums or museum-like historical structures. Here in our penultimate chapter we present a selection of additional exhibits from those museums. Their fascinating exhibits could’ve kept us going for several more chapters albeit with increasingly diminishing returns. I tried to be choosy when curating the previous chapters, so the following gallery represents the honorable mentions, some of which were perhaps unfairly cut. Enjoy!
We know it’s time to go home when we start craving good ol’ home cookin’ or corporate simulations of it,
The last day. The final hours. The way home.
Pittsburgh to Indianapolis is a six-hour drive. Two detours for Presidential burial sites in Ohio made six feel like twenty.
President #29: Warren G. Harding, d. 8/2/1923, age 57.
Our Presidential body count so far on this vacation:
…and now, two hours from the William McKinley Memorial and 3½ hours from home, we wended our way through a maze of lazy country highways and one construction detour to reach the final American President on our week-long tour. We had not saved the best for last.
No, animatronic William and Ida McKinley think YOU’RE the creepy one.
Seven days, nine museums. I’ve been counting Presidential burial sites from the beginning, but I hadn’t done the math on how many museums or museum-esque structures we visited on this trip till just now. In all that’s counting:
…and the subject of our next chapter. It wasn’t a primary objective, but it was next door to one, and we had a little money left in the budget for their ticket prices. We figured why not add one more to the roster.
You can tell our next President has a bigger fan base than some of the others in this series — far more wreaths, and his final resting place is indoors.
I realize these chapters have been rather spaced apart and there’ve been so many of them, but we’re technically in the home stretch now. After a quick lunch stop in West Virginia, only one state stood between us and home. We’d already paid respects to one American President from Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, back on Day One. Two more Presidential gravesites lay ahead on the trail before we would cross the final state border.
1942’s “We Can Do It!” by Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller was meant to be a motivational poster for Westinghouse employees, but in later years came to be associated with the same year’s popular song “Rosie the Riveter”.
We had traveled to the Heinz History Center to view artifacts from the life of Mister Rogers. We amused ourselves with the international catalog of Heinz food products. Elsewhere around the other seven floors, a variety of exhibits told more stories about Steel City’s lives, history, and pop culture.
Would you be mine? Could you be mine?
Last summer Anne and I had the pleasure of seeing the 2018 documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, in which filmmaker Morgan Neville extolled the virtues of Fred Rogers and the PBS childhood series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that was an integral childhood touchstone, surrogate parent, and best friends for millions of American children (e.g. my lovely wife), many of whom are now adults remembering when civility, friendliness, and neighborly love were virtues rather than optional baggage. To be honest, I was more deeply moved by PBS’ own documentary Mister Rogers: It’s You I Like, aired a few months before Neville’s take hit theaters, but both are worthy in their own ways.
A few days ago I may have gotten a little testy in a way that would’ve disappointed Mister Rogers when I noted that the MCC entry about Won’t You Be My Neighbor? earned exactly zero Likes from other WordPress users. Either my writing about the experience was terrible, or, as I joked in partial self-deprecation, “apparently bloggers hate Mister Rogers. Duly noted.”
If my snark was too on-the-nose and you really do consider Mister Rogers to be an enemy of all humankind and kindness to be obsolete hogwash…then this entry isn’t for you either. You’re loved anyway.
Ketchup: the most controversial hot dog topping in America. It’s torn apart families and friendships, and earned a stink-eye at so many New York City tourists.
We both like food. Anne likes history. Before we headed home, it made sense to make time for a little food history.
A bit of Philadelphia at night. This one was my wallpaper on my work PC for a while.
On the road a curious idea for a side project struck me: take pictures of the views from each of our hotel rooms and see what the resulting montage looks like. It would’ve been a much cooler idea if we’d stayed only at the swankiest accommodations with the most breathtaking views outside — say, next to some giant national monuments or rolling New Zealand hills. We’re not affluent enough to stay anywhere we want, but I made our reservations at different price levels for variety and fun just to see what would happen. One of the hotels definitely didn’t disappoint.
Clockwise from top left, I think: Berry Bomb, Double Mocha, Banana Split, Cheesecake, Andes Mint, and Cookie Monster!
Eagle-eyed viewers used to our vacation storytelling pattern may or may not have noticed that we’ve been skipping breakfast mentions for most of this series. That ends now as we step back and cover the donut shops that brightened our mornings in three cities, plus a bonus sports donut along the way.
Past a certain point on some road trips, you’re okay with not looking left, right, or up — only forward to the end.
Day Six would prove the least exciting day of the week. We were glad to check off two sites on our master list — Valley Forge and James Buchanan’s grave — but otherwise anxious to get through the rest of Pennsylvania and closer to home. We hit that same wall on every trip, when fatigue and homesickness begin to dampen our enthusiasm, when our meal budget is well over halfway spent, and when the impulse to make extra stops along the way loosens its grip on us.
We left a few attractions in store to ensure Day Seven wouldn’t be a featureless slog. But first we had to get Day Six over with.
President #15: James Buchanan, d. 6/1/1868, age 77.
Day Six would prove to be a long and draining day, but we refused to be swayed from sticking to our theme, even though it meant a detour for the sake of a politician saddled with a “consistent ranking by historians as one of the worst presidents in American history” per one or more Wikipedia editors. Honestly, we’re not in a position to argue with them.
Getting the obvious, obligatory out of the way up front: of course they have a George Washington statue.
A few weeks after we returned home from this vacation, Anne wore her souvenir Valley Forge T-shirt to breakfast at a Bob Evans. When the cashier asked what that was, Anne spent a few minutes providing a free history lesson while trying not to weep for our school systems. We tend not to buy or collect too many souvenirs, but this became one of the few times she found one useful for educational outreach.
I was out of earshot, so I couldn’t tell you if she also explained how Valley Forge is neither a valley nor a forge.
That time we met a gold rabbit gazing upon the adventure of General George Washingbun at Valley Furge.
DAY SIX: Thursday, July 12th.
Hundreds of miles stood between us and our next hotel, as well as Presidential Gravesite #7 and one major historical site. None of the breakfast options within walking distance from our hotel sounded appealing. Instead, the night before, I scoped out a restaurant in a suburb called King of Prussia, some 35 minutes northwest according to that evening’s search results. That didn’t sound like such a long wait for breakfast and required only a slight detour off our original printed directions.
In the morning, we would encounter our biggest, most stressful challenge of the entire week: escape from Philadelphia.
Branly Cadet’s “A Quest for Parity”, September 2017.
Towns with a long and storied history tend to be big on statues and sculptures. Nothing brings great Americans to life more robustly than three-dimensional stone doppelgängers. We concluded Day Five with one last stroll through Center City Philadelphia, surrounded by art on all sides as the sun retreated into the west.
In the shadow of Philadelphia’s Masonic Temple is a big red Sorry piece. (Some sites think it’s a Parcheesi piece. Not from any Parcheesi set I ever played.)
Wouldn’t it be awesome to have board game pieces that you could never, ever possibly lose? Philly has just the place for you.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 